9 de dezembro de 2012

Authors and publishing companies releasing ebooks on Amazon often cannot brand effectively. While authors have the option to create their own profiles, which helps build synergy between various titles, publishers for the most part have been completely left out. Amazon is seeking to remedy this situation by introducing Amazon Pages.Amazon Pages is a new initiative that will create a dedicated page that is easily marketable. This falls under the newly launched Amazon Marketing Services. It is basically a suite of self-service tools that enhance your ability to meet your marketing objectives. Encourage customers to learn about your brand and buy your products with free, customizable Amazon Pages. Use Amazon Posts to deliver social content to current and potential customers.

“I think what we’re seeing as we move from market to market, readers have suddenly realized they are no longer constrained to their local market anymore, they’re no long constrained to their local bookstore anymore. They aren’t even neceesarily constrained to their own language anymore,” said Tamblyn.He mentioned specifically the massive sales of English-language ebooks in markets such as the Netherlands, where English-language instruction begins early in school but also where the market for native language ebooks hasn’t quite caught up to other markets.

This Christmas, dedicated eReaders and tablets than can read eBooks are more popular than ever. To help you navigate through all the fabulous products but also the challenging technical issues, TMO is launching a multi-part eReader/eBook series of articles to help you navigate the technology, services and devices.

In a year of dramatic digital publishing developments, we’ve asked publishers, writers, agents, developers, academics, literary organisations and others working in digital publishing here and in the US, to give us their thoughts on the biggest stories and themes to come out of 2012 – and to tell us what they think is on the horizon for 2013.

Publishers and authors are shaping new standard contracts as the industry shifts toward digital-first and e-original book publishing.As opposed to big publishers, which are thought to pay authors a standard ebook royalty of 25%, new independent ebook publishers like The Atavist, Open Road Media and OR Books, can and do pay authors substantially more. But, on what terms? And, royalties aren’t the only issue at hand as a new publishing landscape emerges.

In pre-ebook days, gatekeeping was done by the traditional publishers; today, with the rise of ebooks, especially self-published ebooks, it is the reader who is responsible for doing his or her own gatekeeping. The problem is how to do it. All of the traditional tools are still available with the exception of the traditional publisher’s staff. Some of the tools are less valid, today, such as “customer” reviews than they once were, but even the less-valid tools offer some guidance. For me, I’ve added one tool to my armory: dreams.

Kobo is aiming to have its e-reading software fully support the EPUB 3 ebook programming language by the third-quarter of 2013, according to Jim Dovey, EPUB content formats evangelist at Kobo.“Kobo is aiming to be the first company to support all of EPUB3,” said Dovey, speaking on a panel about digital rights management technology at the Copyright and Technology 2012 conference in New York. “The aim is as soon as humanly possible. But that’s largely where we’re aiming [third-quarter 2013].”

It's the organisation's latest guide to e-reader privacy policies, including Amazon's Kindle, Kobo and Sony, and it finds that "in nearly all cases, reading ebooks means giving up more privacy than browsing through a physical bookstore or library, or reading a paper book in your own home".

RCS Libri, Italy's second biggest publishing group, is to launch a service which will give passengers on Italian trains free access e-books in order to study the way consumers read and discover digital content.

Kobo lands in Brazil in a partnership with Livraria Cultura, one of the best bookstores in the country and a pioneer on the online book sales business. The launch was at Livraria Cultura’s main store, in the heart of São Paulo – a wonderful building where, years ago, three movie theater exhibition rooms were standing, at Paulista Avenue. The bookstore was crowded, with lots of people browsing for the Kobo Touch eReader and listening to a reading section with famous actors and actresses reading their favorite books on Kobo devices. The company announced yesterday almost 9k titles available and according to Camila Cabete, Kobo Publishers Relation Brazil, publishers are converting pBooks into eBooks faster everyday.Comparing to the US, that is nothing, but these are only ePub digital books. In Brazil, including PDF files – that some Publishers produced in the beginning of their digitizing process – there are about 16k titles. But the number is growing fast. Greg Bateman, an expert on the digital book world, columnist at PublishNews and founder of Hondana, a “digital books” service provider based in São Paulo, told me yesterday that his company is converting/producing between 200 and 300 titles a week during these last months of the year.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the December 16, 2012 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending December 1, 2012.